Thermaltake ISGC-100 CPU Cooler Review

Introduction

Today we tested Thermaltake ISGC-100, a "small" horizontal cooler with three heatpipes and a 92-mm fan with a special fan blade design to reduce noise. But will its cooling performance be comparable to the performance of other coolers we tested recently?

By the way, ISGC stands for "Inspiration of Silent Gaming Cooling". No, we also don’t think this expression makes any sense at all. Maybe it is another "Engrish" expression.

ISGC-100 is a relatively small cooler and can be installed in SFF cases. Its box (also small) can be seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Box.

Inside the box besides the cooler itself we found the user manual, a sticker for the computer case, a small white thermal compound bag and the hardware necessary to install the cooler on AMD or Intel (socket LGA775) processors.

Figure 2: Contents of the box.

The general aspect of ISGC-100 is good. It is much smaller than coolers we tested recently, but it has three 6-mm copper heatpipes, two of them folded and passing again into the heatsink, working as if there were five heatpipes.

Figure 3: Thermaltake ISGC-100.

Three of the heatpipes endings are protected by plastic caps, which we could not figure out their purpose. As you can see in Figures 4 and 5, the fan is attached to the heatsink by two steel clips, being very easy to remove. It touches the heatsink directly, with no mechanism to avoid the vibration from the fan to be transferred to the body of the cooler.

Figure 4: Side view.

Over the cooler base there is an aluminum heatsink in charge of the heat dissipation.